The Wave

Errol is awakened again by a strange prank caller asking for him by name and claiming to be his father--who has been dead for several years. It feels like a surreal call from the grave, until Erroll hears the unmistakable sound of a handset being put down on a table. Curious, and not a little unnerved, he sneaks into the graveyard where his father is buried. What he finds there will change his life forever. But once Errol's been touched by the Wave, a presence infecting the planet, can anything be the same again? With the bold imagination that made Blue Light a bestseller, Walter Mosley returns to science fiction with a novel both eerie and transcendent.

Bestseller Mosley's latest foray into allegorical SF is reminiscent of his 1998 novel, Blue Light, but it isn't nearly as rich and captivating. How should the book's hero, Errol, react when his late, beloved father reappears as a younger, ecstatic, incomplete version of the father's former self? How should the government respond when nearly invincible reanimated bodies claiming to be portions of a primordial life-form appear in our midst, out of an immense wave? And how can that life-form, which strives only for harmony, connect with us if it can't make itself understood to the fanatical military doctor, who takes Errol and his father prisoner, and is developing a poison to exterminate the peaceful newly arisen dead lest they overwhelm the human population? Mosley fails to sustain the deep, meaningful tone that would have brought this pensive tale to life. Even various sexual encounters and communions with the vast universe lack passion. This wave is fast and small, but it leaves little behind in its wake. (Jan.)
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Mosley's wandered off turf again, writing imitation Dean Koontz and calling it science fiction. Out-of-work programmer Errol Porter lives in his former garage since his wife ditched him and the house was sold. For work he maintains a pottery shop, where he has struck up a relationship with artist Nella, which is good because it gives him someone to tell about the weird phone calls he's been getting from a guy who sounds like his nine-years-dead father. He discovers it is his dad, but he's only 20 and says that he really just embodies Errol's father's memories and is actually part of the "wave" that a meteor brought to earth one and a half billion years ago. "Goofy," Errol thinks, until he is hauled away by a secret army operation that already knows about the wave because of other reanimated dead people. The army's bent on destroying the revenants and every other manifestation of the wave, including Errol if they find he has been "infected." Errol escapes and joins the wave people in fleeing and trying to hide their life source. In the process, Errol boffs several other women, gets buff, and writes this first-person account. The (mercifully undetailed) sex seems gratuitous, the wave business feels mushy, Errol's captivity and escape are like scenes from a dull-witted fifties "sci-fi" flick, and the characters aren't even strong cardboard. For Mosley completists only. Ray Olson
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